Record of the Month Club: Let’s Go Eat the Factory, by Guided by Voices

A Semitic friend of Roger Khan’s, the great American sportswriter, once said: “Before, I used to cheer, ‘Jew.’ But, these days, I cheer ‘old.’ ” Me, I’m not there yet, but I can see the attraction. As one ages, expectations and allegiances shift, and if, in music, that means a few best-years-ever for Billy Joel or Elton John, it also means support and respect for Merle Haggard and Iggy Pop, who aren’t forced to look for real work after a lifetime playing in the garden.

Still, whenever Cheap Trick or Status Quo or even Van Halen announce a new tour and album, my thoughts turn to, “Please don’t suck, please don’t suck.” Should a veteran musician exceed all expectations, one is rewarded for a lifetime of devotion, but mostly, the results fall somewhere in between.

Such is the case with Guided by Voices, and their new record, Let’s Go Eat the Factory. I wanted this album to yield their best-year-ever because, over time, the band has proven important to me. The night before I left to visit Transylvania in 1999, my wife and I went to see Robert Pollard and his middle-period ensemble at the Opera House in Toronto, sitting in the balcony as the waves of sound rolled over us.

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The band was heavy and propulsive and Pollard was in fine voice. The only other time I’d seen them was during an unfortunate evening opening for Urge Overkill, where Pollard, drunk off his ass, was taken by security and locked in a room for being abusive and, allegedly, violent. While all of this was going on, a few kids appealed to me to help him, but there was no reasoning — or getting past — the gorillas who’d barricaded the area. Pollard was eventually let go, but it was years before GBV ever returned to play Toronto. As a result, the Opera House show possessed a certain spirit of defiance. It was a few weeks later, in Bucharest, when my wife told me that she was pregnant with our first child. Our daughter, now 11, had been swimming around to the band’s roaring sounds. I can’t imagine a better indoctrination into the spirited world of rock ’n’ roll.

GBV has long been associated with pioneering lo-fi, a DIY sound popular among indie players, but anybody with any sense of musical history knows that great, but crummy-sounding, records have been around forever. Instead, the band’s contribution over the years has been to perfect the two- to three-minute rock song, celebrating its limitations as it plays within them. The form is usually squared-off, but the melodies are soaring and winding. Their best albums — Isolation Drills, Mag Earwhig!, Do the Collapse, Alien Lanes and Bee Thousand — are stunning carousels of craft and attack, jam-packed with twentysomething compositions that range from the profound to the absurd. Few American bands can attest to such breadth of ideas.

While it’s true that, in essence, making art is an act of survival, everyone hopes that their next work will be better than their previous one, no matter how unlikely the math or impossible the notion. It’s a terrible curse, then, to go into the studio and make a positively good album, only to have it fall short of people’s expectations. Alas, this is the case with Let’s Eat the Factory, which, by most standards, would sit comfortably in one’s discography, but, in the instance of GBV, falls short of their better works.

This is despite songs such as the album’s soaring opener, Laundry and Lasers, the ballad Who Invented the Sun, the micro-epic How I Met My Mother, and the Midwestern thump of Imperial Racehorsing, all of them stand-out tracks. But Let’s Go Eat the Factory yields 21 songs. One of the most commonly heard complaints from uncommitted GBV listeners was that their records were too long, and possessed too many sketches, too many half-songs. The rest of us would wave our hands and scoff. But here, they have a point. As a single album, Let’s Go Eat the Factory would have twice the whomp.

Still, the fan in me excuses the fat of the work the way one excuses the expanding waistline of an old friend. While it’s hard to stay musically fit after so many chords and shows and albums have been rolled under you, this isn’t to say you can’t try to stay on top of things. In fact, if you listen closely and listen through, Guided by Voices, at least, sound motivated enough to keep going, which is the only way you end up with better albums in later years, something of which they are surely capable. One song, called Old Bones, is unlike anything they — or anyone else in rock ’n’ roll — has ever done. It is more than good. I think you should hear it.